Tuscaloosa County had to hand-count its more than 11,000 absentee ballots today after a high-speed automatic feeding machine kept giving a wrong count, said Probate Judge Rob Robertson.
Poll workers ran the ballots through multiple times and the machine was giving a number that didn’t match the known number of envelopes opened, so they did a double hand-count that showed all the ballots were there and counted, Robertson said.
It appeared to be a reading error by the machine, which was giving a number that didn’t match the known number of ballots.
“It’s a high-end, high-speed counter you only use for absentees,” Robertson said.
The high-speed machine that handles the absentee ballots is a different model from the one at polling places that are hand-fed each ballot one at a time, he said.
Those worked fine, he said. “Those are our workhorses,” he said. “We have a lot of them, at 54 polling places, that feed in one ballot at a time. They’re very accurate. It scans the ballot. You always have your paper backup.”
The absentee ballots can’t be certified by the probate judge until the number processed by the machine matches the known number of ballots that came in, Robertson said.
After running through the high-speed machine, the machine’s read-out number didn’t match the number of ballots.
“That’s why the checks and balances are there,” Robertson said.
The entire process was watched by experienced poll-watchers who were baffled by why the number wasn’t matching.
“Everybody checks off, all the observers,” Robertson said. “If you don’t balance, I’m not going to check off on that. They kept saying we can’t get it to balance. Something was not agreeing. It has to balance.”
The machine miscount raised the possibility that some ballots were missing, but they were not, he said.
“They were right there,” he said. “No ballot could have left that room. The process worked. That’s why we have checks and balances.”
The absentee ballots will be machine-counted again tomorrow by the hand-fed, one-ballot at-a-time machines that have been brought in from the polling places to the courthouse annex, he said. That will take several hours. They will double-verify the hand count, he said.
The high-speed machine has an automatic loader to put the absentee ballots in. The ballots have a fold in them, which can occasionally cause problems.
“The challenge with absentees is they’re folded,” Robertson said. “They jam sometimes. I can’t say why it was doing what it was doing. Some ballots were not being counted in the machine. It wasn’t adding up. It was under-processing. It has to match. You know exactly how many envelopes were opened. You have to account for every ballot. So, then you re-count the envelopes by hand."
It was a heavily scrutinized process. “All the party observers were there,” Robertson said. "We have folks who have done this for decades.”
The glitch would not have affected the outcome of any races, but delayed certification of the absentee count, he said.
“No, it couldn’t have affected any races,” Robertson said. “You never want a delay, but I’m not going to certify it until it matches.”
The double-verified hand count proved it was a machine glitch, he said.
“All the ballots were there,” he said. “Every ballot was accounted for.”
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November 06, 2020 at 05:48AM
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